Holocene makes cross-border Supply Chain stable and predictable
Constantly growing demands for quality and sustainability have led to industries focusing more intensively on supply chain transparency and traceability. The company Holocene offers an AI-driven software (SaaS) that enables customers to optimize cross-border supply chain processes. The software brings visibility and traceability, and it builds trust between all trade stakeholders. Founders and Managing Directors Romain Fayolle and Navneet Lekshminarayanan received funding from BEUMER Group to support their venture.
How can cross-border Supply Chain be made more stable, transparent and predictable? The Berlin-based company Holocene has been working on finding the solution for this multi-faceted problem, which involves compliance with various trade agreements, regulations, and customs classifications, all of which are constantly changing. Companies use many different sources and often hire experts to keep up to date with these changes. Shippers often manually prepare documents that are unfortunately based on outdated regulations and on frequently unreliable information from the staff of various departments under extreme time pressure. In the worst-case scenario, important shipping documents may be incomplete or incorrectly filled out.
“Our Holocene software is based on state-of-the-art cloud and AI technologies,” says Romain Fayolle. “This means we can ensure that our customers safely comply with trade regulations and streamline their document creation processes.” His team includes supply chain, logistics & tech engineers, advised by trade compliance experts. Beam, the start-up incubator of the BEUMER Group, also based in Berlin, provided the founders with financial support. The incubator aims to solve unique logistics problems. Holocene is the seventh company to be incorporated under the Beam umbrella. It took seven months from the idea to the foundation of the company.
Holocene is a software that provides customers with cloud and AI technologies applied to trade compliance. Since it is a plug-and-play solution, customers can connect it to their ERP systems with hardly any IT effort, saving them costs and providing them with flexibility and the benefits of easy handling.
The customer can upload all scattered, manually created trade and customs instructions into Holocene. The software then converts these into digitalized, standardized, and actionable business rules stored in a secured database, to which only the customer’s shipping team has access. The Holocene software automatically checks shipping documents for compliance with trade regulations such as import duties, import licenses, and export permit requirements, internal taxation, and technical declarations of conformity in 191 countries. It automatically updates the policies and notifies the responsible employees should changes occur. The software makes recommendations if a change affects the shipping documents and issues alerts if the regulations cannot be complied with. These rules out problems with customs clearance at the destination. “We work together with leading institutions to regularly provide updates and always be up-to-date,” Fayolle explains. “Our solution is ideal for anyone who wants to ship physical goods from one country to another with no problems. Our customers can reduce their processing time and minimize costs associated with delays.”
More information at www.holocene.eu
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